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Solaris X86 RT clock

Having enough Unix blood in my veins – be it Solaris, BSD, Linux, AIX, Ultrix, Xenix, SCO, whatever – when I install Linux on a PC I always configure the CMOS clock to be running in GMT. When that system runs Windows too, it's maybe not too wise a choice, but the purist in me likes the Unix method of having a UTC based real-time clock.

Here I have to side step for a bit and give air to a personal rant: Why on earth (very literally in this case) are calendar systems, especially on PDAs, not able to schedule meetings in a different timezone than where you are. And in addition keep track of the timezone you're in. Even if you're not a road warrior, con-calls are attended from many zones. It gets worse, let's say you are in EST when you schedule the con-call, and after travelling from EST to CST you attend. By now your calender has become a complete mess. That's why PDAs should use the Unix method for storing dates and times. And the applications of course need to change.

Back to our notebook with that combo of Windows, Linux and Solaris. With two-out-of-three winning here :-), I always configure the real-time clock to run in UTC. Of course you have to be careful that Windows isn't syncing with an NTP server. Still I had problems with the time on my system and I must admit that I blamed that fully on Windows. Which is not true ... but also true.

Investigating this a bit more systematically and reading the appropriate man pages, I discovered that Solaris X86 assumes your real-time clock to run in local time. This, because Solaris also assumes that it has to co-exist with Windows. Therefore, if you read the manpage for /usr/sbin/rtc and look in the file /etc/rtc_config, you will see that it stores the seconds between the local clock and UTC to take care that when the CMOS clock runs local-time, the Unix kernel can run in UTC and then the normal Unix TZ mechanism is used so that date/time info gets displayed again in local time. In my opinion this is really to Take The Long Way Home, but that's how it is.

#
#       This file (/etc/rtc_config) contains information used to manage the 
#       x86 real time clock hardware.  The hardware is kept in the machine's 
#       local time for compatibility with other x86 operating systems.  This 
#       file is read by the kernel at boot time.  It is set and updated by
#       the /usr/sbin/rtc command.  The 'zone_info' field designates the local 
#       time zone.  The 'zone_lag' field indicates the number of seconds 
#       between local time and Greenwich Mean Time.
#
zone_info=Canada/Mountain
zone_lag=21600

I didn't test it, but I presume this gets updated on-the-fly at the start and end of Daylight Savings Time. Bottomline is that whether you like it or not, the CMOS clock must run in local time and that you must configure your Linux installs accordingly.

Posted at 04:41PM May 11, 2006 by WWWillem in Software  |